Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 18, 2012 @08:46AM
from the anticipation-defuses-censorship dept.

WebMink writes "Knowing that its explosive special edition on China this week will be blocked by censorship, UK political magazine 'New Statesmen' has taken the unusual step of posting its own torrents of the PDF of the Mandarin edition on the magazine. Looking at the content of the issue they are probably right to expect censorship — there's an article from the former newspaper editor Cheng Yizhong about media censorship, and Ai Weiwei interviews a member of the '50 cent party' — a commenter paid half a dollar every time he derails an online debate in China. 'Essentially, these people are paid internet trolls; their job is to stop any meaningful discussion online about the government.'" Specifically, the magazine has made available this issue as a PDF and also as a torrent (magnet link).

If you read the article, the New Statesmen themselves refer to it as "pirated" (in quotes). While one could pay money for the Magazine, those who can read Mandarin can get it for free using pirating methods where the print version will most likely not see the light of day due to state censorship. They are using this technique as its well known "the internet routes around censorship"

It should be "Chinese Edition" since it refers to the written language. Mandarin is a spoken dialect of Chinese, roughly equivalent to what "Received Pronunciation" is to English. Chinese can generally understand all Mandarin, though few outside of Beijing can speak it perfectly.

Modern written Chinese borrows heavily from Mandarin grammar and vocabulary, while retaining some conventions from Classical Chinese, the older written form that was pretty much impossible to understand when read aloud.

While it is possible to write in Chinese characters using Cantonese, Minnan or Wu grammar, it's quite rare and considered strange or wrong, even in regions where those dialects are spoken.